My First Successful Solo Plexing Mission (Sorta)

Isk, isk, isk! 

Upon joining my corp and beginning to get ships blown up on the regular, I realized that I would have a need for tons and tons of isk. Especially when I heard people on comms talking about ships that cost 20 billion. And here I thought I was doing well with 20,000. 

I'll admit, I caved upon started my character and bought a plex for a whopping $17.99. I didn't want to beg friends and corpies for isk, because honestly, what's more f--king annoying in an MMO? I reasoned that I would make it up later after I got a few ships fitted. When I told a friend that I had bought a plex, she gasped and scolded me, explaining to never use real money to buy isk. Yeah yeah, okay. Lesson learned. #eyeroll

So, I got a few ships fitted and did some reading about farming isk. Running missions was lame. Pick up a part from system X and deliver it to system Y in some allotted amount of time. Lame. I also looked up mining. I read over mining for about five minutes before I closed my browser tab. It also sounded lame. Someone had also mentioned playing the market and working on industry. Cool, well, where am I going to get the isk to start? And how would I even know what to buy or sell, or to craft? I could feel a tension headache forming at the very thought.

"So how the hell am I going to make some isk?" I asked one night on comms. The plex I had purchased sold for around 550k and I was down to about 380k.  ... Mostly because the only thing I knew about clones was to "just get one". I ended up buying clone grade psi, which is the second highest grade clone you can buy, apparently. 

Side note: Can we talk about how high the numbers are with regards to in game currency? I'm by no means dull, but when you start talking about digits in the tens of thousands, millions, billions.. come on, that's too many zeros. 2600? 26000? 26000000000? I tried to give a buddy 30k for implants (wtf are those, anyway?) the other day and only gave him 3,000. I just can't with all these zeroes. 

I finally got the low down on isk: plexing. After some explanation, it sounded pretty fun. You can start those timed event things in a faction warfare system and earn loyalty points you can trade for stuff to sell on the market. Quite a mouthful right there, sure. At first, I eye rolled yet again at the idea. Instead of boring mission running or mining, I would have to risk my ship for a large pay out. I wasn't happy about that, but I had to remind myself that EVE is just that -- always risking your ship for something, whether it be a kill, transporting, or plexing. It's just that high stakes and it was something I would have to get used to. 

I tried about two weeks ago to go plexing, and I died horribly. I can't even remember where exactly I plexed, but I sure as hell didn't do it right. Didn't even check who was around in local, nor did I even know how to use a directional scanner.

I got a plexing tutorial for noobs by my ever helpful corp (love you guys!). Basically: our war targets are mostly in EU time zones, and when you plex in their system, it yields higher LP. So the trick is at such an early phase in the game for a new player flying solo, is to wait for them all to go to bed or go to work and travel through their systems. Oh yeah, and I learned to ALWAYS check local and spam the hell out of my d-scan.

I had a little time to kill, and with the help of a FW map my corp has, I found myself making my way about seven jumps from my home system to Hadozeko. Local was mostly empty, and when I warped to the plex at 10m (yeah!! I remembered!!), no one inside. So I headed in.

It was pretty uneventful, so I did the best I could to practice keeping range from both the ticker thingy and the warp in point. A corpie of mine (probably one of the best PvPers in the game), Shiva Makato, inquired as to where I was and he flew out just to patrol in case I got ganked. As if on queue, a Thrasher came into my plex and was burning towards me. Honestly, I didn't even look at the ship type, I just saw BLINKY ORANGE and warped the f--k out of there. I don't know if I'm even able to take anyone on yet in 1v1 (maybe a capsule..).

Shiva showed up in a Tristan and scared off the Thrasher, and I came back in to run down the timer and collect my LP. He was even kind enough to fly out to give me the full amount awarded. 30k LP! It was a lot in my eyes. I had barely been able to save up 10k from doing piddly novices around our own system.   I was almost drooling. Shiva went to activate a medium and I was able to come in during the last few and got another whopping 43k LP. That's almost enough LP for seven slicers!!

 I was so happy, over such a small triumph. Not only had I ventured into bad guy space and was able to assess whether or not it was safe to plex, but I almost got away with it solo, too. And I made out with some badass LP. Soon, I'll be taking over New Eden, plex by plex. 

Maybe in my dreams!